I never knew about a viaduct running through Lewes Road. This is fascinating. Do you know what destinations it would have been linked to?

I was away from Brighton when the Lewes Road viaduct was demolished, and didn't know it had gone until seeing the photos on the website. Progress is progress, but it is still sad to see beautiful Victorian history being pulled down. The craftsmanship was truly amazing. Just think of the many people that have looked from train windows in the past as they travelled over the viaduct, I wonder how many? To them the viaduct would have lasted forever.

It crossed Lewes Road at the junction with Upper Lewes Road, at the southern end of what is now the Vogue Gyratory system. The destination was Kemp Town. Quite a piece of work for a mere branch line that carried 13 return journeys a day in its early years!

The Kemp Town branch was built speculatively at considerable cost as it was felt that Mr Kemp's town would be a valuable source of revenue. However, since the junction with the Lewes - Brighton line at Lewes Road Junction (just the Lewes side of the tunnel near London Road station) faced Brighton, everyone using the branch to go anywhere would have to change at Brighton. The civil engineering involved in this line was out of all proportion to its traffic, which, once the passenger service was discontinued, was limited to the occasional coal train to the coal merchant who had taken over the yard at Kemp Town. The line included a long viaduct (demolished in 1976) and a tunnel. Because the site at the foot of Freshfield road was of limited area from the point at which the line emerged from the tunnel, a 5-way point was installed to give access to the platform and goods yard. This 5-way point was very unusual and in itself was quite an engineering marvel!

My parents worked at Cox's Pharmaceuticals, which you can see in these pictures. It's where Sainsbury's is now. The staff used to go up onto the viaduct (or rather the stump, as the part over the road and the Kemptown side was demolished first) to sit and eat their lunch. My mother still has a brick from the viaduct in her garden rockery!

I was told by a construction teacher at the SecondaryTechnicalSchool that the brickwork of the bridge across Hartington Road, just a little to the east and on the same line to KempTown, was even more amazing and a testament to Victorian engineering skills.  The bridge not only crossed the road at a skew angle but the road itself slopes uphill while the line was on a gradient too. "If you want to see how bricklaying is done, go and see that" he said.

I recall the viaduct clearly from my formative years, jutting out massively across Lewes Road from between AH Cox's pill factory (clearly visible in the above photos) and the Gaiety cinema. It was built on an elegant and quite sharp curve to direct the Kemp Town branch southwards, and towered over two of the three arms of Melbourne Street. In fact it's relation to the surrounding buildings, very close on all sides, made it appear taller than it actually was, but it was an impressive structure nonetheless.

I passed beneath the viaduct on many occasions on my way to play in Saunders Park. By the time I knew it, only infrequent goods services used it, but I can recall once seeing a Bulleid Q1 "Coffee Pot" locomotive crossing it Kemp Town-wards, running light, a rare steam working in the very early sixties.

The viaduct was known locally as The Arches, and is mentioned in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock", in the episode in which Pinkie and his gang go to extort money from the hapless Brewer who "had a house near the tram lines on the Lewes road almost under the railway viaduct". In Melbourne Street, perhaps?

Another sadly departed Brighton landmark, both it and the Gaiety now replaced by the formless Sainsbury's development and gyratory system. Thank goodness it's memory at least has been preserved in Tony Monk's splendid pictures.